ScyllaDB no longer open source | Hacker News Reader

ScyllaDB no longer open source

forum.scylladb.com

56 pointssuperq43 comments

It saved us continuing our evaluation of it when our sales contact told us. Our company has a strict nope on basic infra licenses; closed is not an option. We need to be able to switch (and test everything all the time on the open version if we use binaries). We have been building software for over 35 years now and we have been bitten too many times.

Am I wrong in thinking you can still compile Scylla after the change as it's source available? You just also need a license, right?

Yes, but that's not an option for our lawyers; we need the actual freedom to do whatever. Source available is not a thing for us; it's not about the source (we will probably not ever touch it anyway), it is about the freedom when they go out of business, change the rules , etc. But I am not a lawyer but I do agree: we gladly pay licenses and support but if things go crazy (upping the prices to stupid amounts etc) we need to be able to get out without many issues.

So it's not about Open Source but about Free Software?

“Source available” is not Open Source. Some orgs reportedly have access to Windows source code, but that doesn’t mean they’re building and deploying their own version.

I do like it. What percent of revenue do you contribute back to OSS? As long as it flows both ways, it’s great.

Zero lol

As said in the comment, we pay for support and hosting for the open products that we use and we sponsor on github. % of rev is a good question; I will find that out. What is a good % you would say?

It’s always kind of a relief when I can completely remove something from my long list of things to check out. Life’s too short to bother with proprietary platforms. A closed source database? Hah, no.

Indeed.

your comment made me think I read it wrong, but it's not closed source, they're just moving to a source available license...

A database license that only lets you store 10TB data might as well be closed source

Even better: that’s 10TB per organization.

It’s ok I’m gonna make 100 organizations in the caymans and assign 10 of my clients to each.

> Licensor grants You a limited, non-exclusive, revocable, non-sublicensable, non-transferable,

For now it's source-available with generous limit, but this can be changed or revoked at any time, and this may immediately make your existing installations illegal.

> this can be changed or revoked at any time, and this may immediately make your existing installations illegal.

I was going to argue, but they do explicitly say "revocable." Has such a license revocation ever been upheld in court?

My understanding is it’s the opposite: that license is the only thing granting you usage rights. In the absence of a contract, or words in the license to the contrary, they could revoke those rights on a whim. It’s not so much that you have a default right to use their proprietary software and they may issue something that revokes it. It’s that you have no right to use their software except their continued good will.

The GPL says:

> All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.

That’s a huge difference.

Tomato, tomato. If it’s not FOSS, I’m not going to sign off on wasting time on it.

(Yes, of course I use proprietary services where necessary and they can’t be avoided. This isn’t one of those cases. Example of things where I’m pretty adamant about it: server OSes. Databases. Programming languages. Web servers.)

Source available doesn't allow you to build on that software or patch it the way you see fit.

Heck, even some source available licenses doesn't allow you to compile that thing, let alone get parts and use it elsewhere.

However, I somewhat like source available licenses currently, because they're neat little mines that sneak in to training sets of generative AI models and make the models less suitable for serious work.

How does it make the models less suitable? Wouldn't more high quality source code help improve it? If it was closed source entirely it couldn't be trained on.

If it’s trained on proprietary software and then injects non-Free code into your project, you may have all kinds of unplanned legal exposure. That’s what makes such a model less suitable.

“Source available” is within the common usage of the term “closed source” which is simply the negation of “open source”.

You don't need to look at the source code of Oracle to know it's the best RDBMS

No database is worth entering intoa legal agreement with the closest thing we've ever had to a real life Bond villain.

Best at what?

It has no reputation as the best at any of my database use cases.

> ScyllaDB OSS AGPL 6.2 will stand as the final OSS AGPL release... A free tier of the full-featured ScyllaDB Enterprise will be available.

I wonder if this means YDB (from the devs of Clickhouse) will get some traction (https://ydb.tech/) or if there are other massive scale scylladb-types of DB's out there.

Is ydb same as yugabyte?

It seems like it stands for Yandex DB?

You can click the link, but both are attractive; yugabyte and ydb; they are now 'newsql' as people call it I think; sql that scales without the pain (of course there is pain, but other pain). Both have good licenses. Yugabyte is a mixed license, but the apache parts are enough for our use for instance.

no, they are different technologies

I am hoping ydb gets a little easier to use in general, and supports some things I use from postgres.

Discussion (64 points, 6 days ago, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42457680

I'm surprised it didn't get more upvotes, but probably because most people missed it at this time of year. (I did the first time too)

I found it kinda surprising (it's kinda tough when a primary DB choice is no longer open source!), although not that surprising given the fact that this keeps happening to VC-backed DB startups.

VC backed or not, what is the launch trajectory? Any DB that gets even a little bit of traction is quickly turned into a hosted service by one of the major cloud providers with full support, eliminating the primary path to revenue for these devs. Their options are??

Patreon and pray or go broke?

The Redhat model just doesn’t work in 2024 with the sharks constantly looking for fresh meat.

Launch as closed source / source available right away? Having alternative suppliers is one of the major advantages of OSS after all.

Very few people are complaining about existance of commercial products. People get unhappy when company starts by claiming "open source", attracts followers, and then suddenly becomes "closed source".

The Redhat model just doesn’t work in 2024 with the sharks constantly looking for fresh meat.

I truly believe that the Red Hat model is still possible to achieve today, but the barrier of entry is much higher than before. What sets Red Hat apart from many of these VC backed projects is what they actually offer. Red Hat doesn't primarily provide "services" or singular components like a database^, but delivers platforms.

RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible Automation Platform, OpenStack, Satellite, etc, are the aggregation of many open source projects tied together to make an offering appealing and attractive to enterprises. They produce the infrastructure and management layers of the stack that all your services and applications are deployed on. Working at this level enables a very different degree of flexibility and "safety" in comparison to single application or SaaS style offerings.

There's distinct boundaries of their products as well from the upstream variants: Fedora vs CentOS vs RHEL, OKD/SCOS vs OCP/RHCOS, RDO vs RHOSO, Ansible ecosystem vs AAP, etc. Red Hat also delivers on support, training/education, partner-driven sales, and OEM integration/certification.

^ Main exception would really be the Java middleware solutions, but the Runtimes and Integration offerings could be argued as a platform of their own. Same with RHEL/OpenShift AI.

All the things you’re saying Redhat sells are a result of being in business for 30 years and investing billions. They were not a “platform company” for the vast majority of their existence and would not have survived long enough to transition to platforms if they launched in 2023. That’s the point.

I mean, half the reason they sold to IBM is because even Redhat didn’t think they could withstand the assault from Amazon as a standalone entity…

Seems that ScyllaDB takes advantage of https://seastar.io that shards across cores. It seems to still be open source (for the moment, at least). Wonder if other projects could benefit from its ideas.

That is a shame. Scylladb seemed like a useful database.

They intentionally waited til after the AWS reInvent conference to announce this.

How did the reinvent affect them?

[from the FAQs] Where can I find the source code?

The source code will be available at https://github.com/scylladb/scylladb. Commit notes and comments will also be available in the same repo.

This is happening because no one appreciates the freedom of open source enough to pay for it, the larger projects have a company behind them and need revenue to stay afloat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com